The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
The evolvement of communication technology, particularly IP-based communication technology and end user device, has enabled versatile communication possibilities and introduction of different services. For example, messaging has evolved from text string short messages with a very limited size to various messaging services able to deliver multimedia content not having size restrictions. Further, the messaging may be bi-directional conversation-type of messaging, such as instant messaging or chatting, or uni-directional messaging, called “one shot” or “standalone” messaging. Basically the difference is that in the bi-directional messaging a recipient of a message receives the message in near real-time fashion but in the uni-directional messaging the recipient may receive the message in near real-time fashion, or the message may be temporarily stored in the recipient's network to be delivered later. A reason for deferred delivery of a message may be that the user is not available or not willing to receive it, i.e. the recipient may be in offline state or lost temporarily connection to the network or the recipient's service settings may indicate that the user does not want to be disturbed at the moment, thereby indicating to hold the message, for example. Such messages are called herein waiting messages.
Some messaging services, such as instant messaging using SIMPLE (session initiation protocol for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions) or converged IP (Internet protocol) messaging (CPM), provide alternatives for delivery of the waiting messages. Depending, for example, on the recipient's settings, message characteristics and/or service provider policies, the waiting messages may be pushed to the recipient automatically or the recipient may receive a notification on waiting messages and then decide whether to retrieve, delete, or to store to the user's network storage one or more of the deferred messages.
However, a problem is that selecting different alternatives for different messages within a notification is an iterative process. For example, if the user wants to delete two waiting messages and retrieve one waiting message in a SIP-based (session initiation protocol) messaging system, such as CPM, the user opens the notification, selects from the notification messages to be deleted, then selects delete action which triggers deletion function for deferred messages in user equipment the user is using, the deletion function closing the notification and sending delete instructions in SIP REFER request to address delete@hostname. Then the user opens the notification once again, selects from the notification the message(s) to be retrieved and selects retrieval action which triggers retrieval function for deferred messages in the user equipment, the retrieval function closing the notification, sending retrieval instructions in SIP INVITE request to address deferred@hostname.